The Great Repair – Politics for a Society of Repair

Project by Florian Hertweck, Marija Maric

Capitalist modernity, with its emphasis on innovation, growth, and progress, its economic system based on consumerism, wasteful use, and profligacy, has led to a ruthless exploitation of humans and nature. Architecture has played no small part in this, as the statistics on greenhouse gas emissions and construction and demolition waste prove. As a counterstrategy to capitalism’s creative destruction, The Great Repair advocates a focus on repair, in which nurturing, maintenance and repair become the key strategies for action. The project aims to reorient the foundations of our systems of thought and economy toward economies of repair and care, in order for the economy to be re-embedded in society, and the latter for its part in the natural environment.

The Great Repair is a project developed by Master in Architecture, University of Luxembourg, Department of Architecture at ETH Zürich, ARCH+, and the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. It features two ARCH+ issues, dealing with questions of theory (published in German and English in 2022 and 2023) and practice (forthcoming in 2023). The two issues will be followed by an exhibition to be opened in October 2023 at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, featuring the works of more than thirty international positions from art, architecture, and spatial practices in which repair becomes a new design paradigm. The exhibition examines politics, practices, and aesthetics of repair from a decolonial, feminist, and posthuman perspective.

The Great Repair is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the Wüstenrot Foundation, the Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb), the Hans Sauer Foundation, University of Luxembourg and ETH Zurich.


Editors/Curators: Prof. Dr. Florian Hertweck (University of Luxembourg), Christian Hiller (ARCH+), Felix Hofmann (ARCH+), Markus Krieger (ARCH+), Alex Nehmer (ARCH+), Anh-Linh Ngo (ARCH+), Prof. Milica Topalovi? (ETH Zurich)
Extended Editorial/Curatorial Team: Dr. Marija Maric (University of Luxembourg), Dr. Nazli Tümerdem (ETH Zurich)